March, 26/03/2019
“Memes are being used as a political weapon by certain polarized communities,” says Guillermo Suárez de Tangil, a professor at King’s College London and co-author of an in-depth study of the circulation of memes from marginal communities to the Internet center. “Memes are double-edged tools, behind a caricature that may seem funny, but there may be a lot of background”, adds Suárez de Tangil.
An article published by El Pais.

March, 12/03/2019NewScientist published an article titled “Children can find inappropriate videos on YouTube in just 10 clicks” where they refer to our study “Disturbed YouTube for Kids: Characterizing and Detecting Disturbing Content on YouTube“.
“Young YouTube viewers stand an alarmingly high chance of stumbling across disturbing videos. There is a 45 percent probability of them reaching inappropriate content within 10 clicks of a first, child-oriented YouTube video. “It’s shocking, and confirms what every parent experiences when their kids watch YouTube,” says Michael Sirivianos at Cyprus University of Technology.”

February, 01/02/2019“An EU-funded project is analyzing malicious cyber activity and developing parental control tools to protect minors and to help fight fake news, other malicious content and online sexual predators. The project’s recommendations for policymakers will also help combat harmful online behavior – protecting Europeans.”.
An article published by the European Commission referring to our project.

October, 27/10/2018In the aftermath of the Pittsburgh Synagogue attack, Wired published an article describing an emerging patter of online antisemitism that spills into the real world. The article refers to ENCASE’s and NCRI’s study of Gab.“Anti-Jewish sentiment is also on the rise in seedier online locales, including Gab and the message board 4Chan, both of which are already known to house hate speech and far-right conspiracy theories. The use of term “jew” and a slur for Jewish people dramatically increased on Gab and 4chan’s politically incorrect message board following political events like the 2016 presidential election, President Trump’s inauguration, and the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, according to a study conducted by the non-profit Network Contagion Research Institute that has yet to be peer-reviewed.”.

October, 27/10/2018

In light of the 27/10/18 events in Pittsburgh, it must be apparent by now that online antisemitism, alt-right radicalization and non-nonsensical conspiracy theories spill into the real world with tragic consequences.

October, 17/10/2018BBC refers to our “On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities” paper in the context of Twitter’s banning of 1500 accounts involved in the NPC affair. “Researchers from University College London who analysed a huge database of memes discovered the 4chan message board /pol/ and subreddit r/The_Donald were particularly effective. “We find that /pol/ substantially influences the meme ecosystem by posting a large number of memes, while r/The_Donald is the most efficient community in pushing memes to both fringe and mainstream web communities,” the study’s authors wrote.”

September, 06/09/2018Washington Postpublished an article about our study “A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Online Antisemitism”.
This paper focuses on the emerging problem of online antisemitism. By analyzing over 100M posts from 4chan”s Politically Incorrect board (/pol/) and Gab, we show that the use of ethnic racial slurs, and in particular antisemitic terms, are getting worrying traction on these communities. For instance, we show a substantial rise on the use of racial ethnic terms after Trump”s Inauguration. Also, we show that there is an explosion of coded language for racial slurs and we propose a method to decode racial discourse on fringe Web communities. Finally, we study the dissemination of the Happy Merchant meme, a racist meme showing a caricature of a Jew, finding that /pol/ is an influential actor because of the large volume of generated Happy Merchant memes, while The_Donald subreddit is the most efficient actor in pushing these memes in the mainstream world (i.e., Twitter and rest of Reddit).

July, 09/07/2018
“Twitter”s vast metadata haul is a privacy nightmare for users. “Metadata is much larger when compared to the actual content of a tweet”, says Savvas Zannettou, a PhD student at the Cyprus University of Technology.”.
An article published by WIRED.

July, 03/07/2018“Study Reveals Misuse of Archive Services by Fringe Communities on the Web”.
Article published by Newswise for our research “Understanding Web Archiving Services and Their (Mis)Use on Social Media”. Savvas Zannettou, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini. ICWSM 2018.

June, 04/06/2018“Finally, a scientific list of the most popular memes on the internet. The group, from Cyprus University of Technology, University College London, University of Alabama at Birmingham and King”s College London, set out to make «the first attempt to provide a multiplatform measurement of the meme ecosystem, with a focus on fringe and potentially dangerous communities».”
Articles published by QUARTZ, Business Insider, Nerdcore, MIT Technology Review, VICE, InfoWars, Dailydot, Indy100, Thinkprogress, Iflscience, Hornet for our research “On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities”. Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil. ArXiv, 2018.

April, 05/04/2018“A recent study from a cross-university team of researchers analyzed 22 million posts from 336,000 Gab users, ranging from August of 2016 until January of 2018. They found that the site “exhibits a high volume of hate speech and racism”, “reacts strongly to events related white nationalism and Donald Trump”, and concluded that “while Gab claims to be all about free speech, this seems to be merely a shield behind which its Alt-right users hide”. ”An article by Vice reporting on our paper: Gab Is the Alt-Right Social Network Racists Are Moving to.

February, 22/01/2018“Savvas Zannettou from the Cyprus University of Technology and his colleagues set up an account on Gab, then cross-checked posts against terms in Hatebase, a database used by governments and non-governmental organisations to track the spread of hate speech. One in every 20 posts the researchers analysed included words in the Hatebase corpus ”“ 2.4 times the rate on Twitter. However, hate-filled posts on Gab were only half as common as on 4chan”s /pol/ message board, a notorious home of internet trolls”.
An article published by the New Scientist, based on our paper “What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?“.

January, 30/01/2018“Researchers from Cyprus University of Technology, UCL and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, analysed 27K tweets posted by a thousand Twitter users identified as having ties with Russia’s Internet Research Agency and therefore likely state-sponsored trolls”.
An article published by The Register.

November, 01/11/2017The University of Alabama at Birmingham published the article “Study finds fringe communities on Reddit and 4chan have high influence on flow of alternative news to Twitter” based on our paper “The Web Centipede: Understanding How Web Communities Influence Each Other Through the Lens of Mainstream and Alternative News Sources”.
Subsequently, Phys redistributed that article.

July, 11/07/2017Hacking Distributed published the article “Twitter, Reddit and 4chan: The Web”s Fake News Centipede” based on the ENCASE’s study “The Web Centipede: Understanding How Web Communities Influence Each Other Through the Lens of Mainstream and Alternative News Sources”.
Read more here:http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/07/11/web-centipede/

June, 11/06/2017“Dr. Stringhini told Sky News that the paper, titled Keks, Cucks, and God Emperor Trump, showed that there was a limit to addressing hate speech online when occurrences were considered as isolated incidents”.
An article published by Sky News based on ENCASE’s study “Kek, Cucks, and God Emperor Trump: A Measurement Study of 4chan”s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web”.
More information can be found here:http://news.sky.com/story/research-examines-fake-news-hate-speech-and-4chan-10910915?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter

June, 01/06/2017
“Jeremy Blackburn, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and one of the study”s authors, explained that 4Chan”s interaction structure (where, unlike more mainstream platforms like Facebook or Reddit, there is no like or upvote system, and the only way to gauge audience reaction is by the number of replies) encourages a constant attempt to galvanize a response by just about any means”.
An article published by Motherboard Vice.

February, 28/02/2017
Organizing summer schools is one of the most important training activities in the ENCASE project. The Social Computing Research Center (http://socialcomputing.eu) at the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT), along with the ENCASE consortium organised a Summer School titled “Usable Security and Privacy in Online Social Networks”.
The summer school took place between Monday 17th of July 2017 and Friday 21st of July 2017 in the facilities of the Cyprus University of Technology in Limassol. Cyprus local news and online media disseminated the ENCASE’s summer school.
More information about the articles published by Paideia News and Sigmalive can be found here:http://www.paideia-news.com/http://m.city.sigmalive.com/article/21178/therina-sholeia-pliroforikis-gia-foitites-stin-kypro

November, 09/11/2016The Conversation is an independent, not-for-profit media outlet that uses content sourced from academic and research community. Dr Emiliano De Cristofaro, a co-author of “A Longitudinal Measurement Study of 4chan”s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effect on the Web”, wrote an article in Science and Technology section of The Conversation about his paper. In the article, Dr. De Cristofaro abstractly explained the various contributions of the paper. For instance finding evidence of Raids from 4chan to other Social Websites like YouTube and Twitter, that Operation Google has substantial impact on /pol/ board, and the raising of abusive language, through content analysis, from 4chan users in Youtube comment section.
More information can be found here:http://theconversation.com/4chan-raids-how-one-dark-corner-of-the-internet-is-spreading-its-shadows-68394

September, 28/09/2015:
“The Social Research Informatics Centre (SCRC) (http://socialcomputing.eu/) of Cyprus University of Technology (CUT) received an excellent evaluation for a research project, concerning the protection of minors from Internet threats, called “Enhancing security and privacy in the Social web: a user-centered approach for the protection of minors (ENCASE).According to the CUT”s announcement, the project was submitted to the call under the “Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie Actions” program of HORIZON2020 and received an excellent evaluation after a long and competitive process. The project budget amounts to 2.16 mil Euros and will last four years (2016-2020). The Cypriot beneficiaries of the consortium will receive a total budget of 756K Euro.”
An article published by the Reporter Cyprus online press.
Read more here:http://www.reporter.com.cy/local-news/article/857/diethni-aristeia-sto-tepak-ga

ENCASE is funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchanges Action, Grant Agreement No. 691025.

This project supports the efforts of the Research Executive Agency (REA) for Open Access to scientific results. ENCASE openly links its publications, software, datasets and other artifacts with its project information as required by REA.

Project’s results

The results of the ENCASE project are published by the European Commission.